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Oct 7, 2018 at 9:58 AMOct 7, 2018 at 9:58 AM

We live in a time when wealthy collectors shell out hundreds of millions of dollars for a single artwork, placing seemingly unlimited value on them. But how does that compare with the value of the natural treasures that surround us and which is ultimately more important?

A new installation at Worcester Art Museum by internationally recognized artist Lee Mingwei poses those questions and asks us to think about what our ownership of anything actually means. Called “Stone Journey,” the installation is a simple one of just two objects, a small stone Lee collected from a New Zealand river and an exact replica he cast in bronze.

Lee, a Taiwanese artist who now lives in Paris, is known for asking us to ponder the deeper significance of the seemingly mundane. He graduated from California College of Art, in the fine-arts-based textile program, and from Yale University, where he studied sculpture. His work has been shown all over the world, including at the Whitney Museum, MoMA, the Venice Biennale and, closer to home, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Lee’s projects are usually ephemeral, thought-expanding projects in which he asks viewers to reach for a more expansive concept of everyday things such as mending, letter writing and even sleeping. His Mending Project, for example, involved having people bring items of clothing to a museum where Lee or a volunteer would invite the clothing bearer to sit and chat while the object was repaired. The goal was the conversation shared between mender and museum-goer, rather than merely being able to walk out with, say, newly sewn-up seams on shirt.

“Stone Journey,” which will be on view through Aug. 4, 2019, continues Lee’s quest, albeit in a more permanent and tangible format. His piece is set in WAM’s Chinese Decorative Arts Gallery, amid elegant ceramics and jades, the oldest dating to the 7th century. A wall label by Vivian Li, WAM’s associate curator of Asian art, outlines the installation’s aims:

“’Stone Journey’ poses important questions about natural and artistic beauty by presenting a bronze replica alone with the original stone collected from the glacier-sculpted riverbanks of New Zealand. Which is more valuable? A natural object or one made by an artist? And what does it mean to possess an artwork as an object or as an idea? As part of owning the work, Lee requests that its collector eventually return to nature one of the pair, raising issues of ownership, control, value and loss.”

Viewers of the exhibition are invited to think of the artist’s request and decide which stone they would choose.

I spoke with Lee in the gallery just before “Stone Journey” opened. The exhibition had very recently been installed, offering a striking contemporary note to the gallery’s display of venerable objects from Imperial China. Lee’s installation had the newest object in the room – the bronze replica he cast in 2009. It also had the oldest by far – the original river stone some 63 million years old. We spoke about what his inspiration for the project was and what he thinks viewers might take away from it. Here are his answers, lightly edited for brevity and clarity:

Q: How did your idea for this project come about?

A: I was in a national park in southern New Zealand, a glacial park, and I was standing in this very shallow river admiring the beautiful environment and then, when I looked down to my feet, I saw all these rocks and I just thought ‘I’m going to pick 11 out of these rocks here.’ Once I had done that it really changed everything. It changed my life. It changed their lives by selecting them just randomly. I then brought them back to Taiwan and fabricated a bronze for each, so there are 11 sets of these in the world.

Q: Why did you decide to choose 11 stones?

A: I don’t know why 11. All these rocks are smaller than palm size, so I think that’s the answer. That’s how many I can hold in my hand.

Q: You seem to feel that rocks have a life?

A: Indigenous Taiwanese believe – I am indigenous Taiwanese, partly, and so are the Maori in New Zealand. They believe that everything has life, even rock has life. So, these rocks have been in that river for maybe a million or 2 million years and every year there’s this water washing over them and now there’s this human being picking them up and with that gesture I think it changed the course of that river and of these rocks and also changed the people who encounter them.

Q: How so?

A: For example, out of these 11 sets, nine sets belong to nine different collectors. None of them has done the exercise and I often see these friends on different occasions, so I’ll be very naughty saying, ‘Have you done your homework yet?’ And some of them say ‘Oh yeah, I’m going to throw away the one that was made by you.’ And the next day they’ll say, ‘Oh no. I’m going to throw away the other one.’ They kind of oscillate between the manmade one and the natural one. But none of them has done it and it’s been quite a few years, so I think I’ve posed a very difficult question about what is it that we own when we own something, and so we’ll see what happens.

Q: Will you try to nudge them into making a choice?

A: I don’t think so because what I have proposed here is really a question, so it’s very similar to this thing called koan in Buddhist practice where the teacher gives the student a question without knowing what the answer is, so the student through life experience they find the answer. In a way I’m doing a similar thing. I’m posing a question for the collectors who own these works and it’s through their life experience that they somehow find the answer. (and now Worcester Art Museum goers too)

Q: Which would you keep?

A: That’s a difficult question. I don’t know. It would really depend on my mental frame of mind at that moment.

Q: When people make their choice, if it’s the rock, would they then have to return it to where it came from?

A: That’s another question this raises. When people finally decide to discard one of them, and let’s say it’s the one that’s from the river, would they just toss it away when they’re in New York or would they bring it back to New Zealand and try to find the river? Even if they did that, it would be a different spot, so there are all those questions. Each of the collectors will find their own answer, and one of them told me he will give the set of stones to his son to carry on this challenge.